Meredith Dursley's Story
by Inspirement
Summary: A sequel to Sandyclaws' fic 'Signs of Magic'. This fic hasn't been approved by the author of the original fic. It begins as Dudley's daughter Meredith goes to Hogwarts, and will follow her throughout her first year.


**Meredith Dursley's Story**

Chapter One:  
>Platform 9¾ and the subsequent trip to Hogwarts<p>

_Summary:__  
><em>_A sequel to Sandyclaws' fic 'Signs of Magic'. This fic hasn't been approved by the author of the original fic. You might call it as a fanfic of a fanfic._

_Anyway, this begins as Dudley's daughter Meredith goes to Hogwarts, and will follow her throughout her first year._

_I recommend that you read 'Signs of Magic' first, but I have tried to write it in a way that you will understand it anyway. If you want to read it, it's available on .com_

_Disclaimer:__  
><em>_This story is written by a fan, for the fans. I make no profit from this story and I am totally fine with that. Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling and I make no claims of ownership regarding him or any other characters, situations, locations or plot points that are part of the Harry Potter universe._

_I do however claim ownership of any original characters, situations, locations or plot points that are __NOT__ part of the Harry Potter universe._

_**Special disclaimer add-on for this fic: **__Meredith Dursley and her backstory belong to Sandyclaws. I do not own her._

_Rating:__  
><em>_PG_

_A/N:  
><em>_This fic will probably be updated extremely slowly, so bear with me. It is the next generation, and follows Meredith 'Merry' Dursley, as she goes to Hogwarts to learn magic (with a little adventure to keep things interesting)._

_I know some of you dislike the Rose/Scorpius ship, so I'll just warn you right away that they will be mentioned in this fic. Don't like, don't read._

• • •

With tears streaming down her cheeks, Meredith Dursley hugged and kissed her parents goodbye.

"It's okay dear, we'll send you lots of letters, okay?" her mum, Audrey Dursley assured her.

"Yes. Every week if you want," continued her father, Dudley.

"Promise?" she asked, her face buried in the folds of her mum's dress.

"Yes, we promise Merry. Now run along, or you'll miss the train," her father urged.

"Okay," she replied, a smile breaking out on her face, only to be replaced by a small frown. "But I'll miss you."

"We know. We'll miss you too. But that's why we bought you your owl you know, so you can contact us whenever you want." Her dad said.

"I know. Thank you," she said, hugging her father one more time before drying her eyes and turning to her trolley. Her best friend, Lily Potter, who's family was apparently all magical, had told her that to get onto the platform from where the Hogwarts express were leaving, you had to walk through the barrier between platforms nine and ten. _That should be the one right in front of me,_ she thought.

But what if she was wrong? What if it was the wrong barrier? What if she had misheard Lily? What if it had all been a big practical joke and there was no such thing as Magic?

But there had to be! How else could she explain Diagon Alley? People walking around in brightly coloured robes, their shopping floating in mid-air, trailing behind them like some sort of bizarre tail. She put her hand in the inner pocked of her jacket and dragged a finger along the wooden stick that resided there. It had to be real.

She turned towards her parents and said goodbye one last time, then she began to walk forwards, picking up speed as she went, until finally, she was in an all-out run. Lily had told her that this was the best way to do it, because even if you had last minute doubts, there would be no time to stop anyway. She was right about that.

The barrier was racing towards her! She was going to crash! She had to stop, she had to slow down! There wasn't more than a meter left! She worked frantically with her feet against the ground to stop her careening trolley, but it was no use. She closed her eyes, awaiting the inevitable clatter of the trolley smashing into the barrier and the handle digging itself into her stomach with the force of her momentum. She could already hear the laughter from the people around her, pointing and laughing at the stupid girl who couldn't control her trolley.

_**CRASH!**_

The trolley hit something, but instead of coming to a complete halt, it turned violently to the left and Merry lost her grip on the handle, as well as her balance, and was propelled into something soft, which unfortunately gave way very quickly, making her fall to the ground in a heap.

Merry opened her eyes and could see a small crowd around her; Or rather, see the feet and legs of them, since her head was resting on the ground with her right cheek planted against the cold stone floor.

She could feel a dull ache in the heel of her right hand, so she supposed she had used it to break the fall. Her right shoulder and left foot was a bit sore too, but her head was okay. _Thank god for natural reflexes,_ she thought.

Then she heard a voice calling from above. It was distinctly male, though she didn't recognize it.

"Hello? You okay?" the voice asked. It sounded concerned.

"Yes," she answered. She wasn't completely okay of course, but she didn't want to show any weakness in front of these strangers.

Then a thought hit her. _Where are my parents? If they saw me crash, they would have run up to me to see if I was okay, wouldn't they?_

She slowly turned her head to look up at the man standing above her.

Her first impression was that he had a kind expression and a lot of wild brown beard. He was smiling gently at her, offering a hand to help her up. She took it gratefully and let the man help her to her feet.

When she was back on her feet and reasonably steady he went to fetch her trolley for her. When he came back, he handed it over and said, "Had a bit of an accident there miss...,"

"Dursley. Merry Dursley"

"Well, just be more careful next time won't you?" the man said before yelling to the group of spectators, "Move along, nothing to see here."

That's when she noticed what the man was wearing. The man who had helped her was wearing robes! In fact, everyone around her were wearing robes.

She quickly looked towards the tracks, and there it was. A large scarlet steam engine with the legend 'Hogwarts Express' embossed in gold letters on a metal plaque attached to the front.

Suddenly feeling a lot better and having no doubt whatsoever if she was magical or not, she started pushing her trolley in front of her, heading towards the nearest carriage to get on the train.

Just as she had picked up her owl cage and trunk and started trying to heave them onto the train, she heard another voice calling, and this one she had no trouble recognizing.

"MERRY!" yelled the girl who was now running towards her, pushing her way through the crowd.

"Lily!" Merry called back to her long-time friend

"You've got an owl!" Lily exclaimed when she reached Merry.

"Yes! Isn't he cute?" Merry replied, holding out the cage, which contained a young barn owl. "I call him Icarus, because he looks like he has flown straight into a wall!"

"That doesn't make any sense!" Lily laughed. "Icarus flew too close to the sun and took a dip in the ocean, not into a wall!"

"I know that," Merry replied, "but it was the first thing I came up with. They both had bad luck flying, I guess."

"Let's just hope that Icarus doesn't take after his namesake," Lily said smiling; then she began to help pulling Merry's trunk up the steps onto the train.

"Come on! You have to sit with me!" Lily said excitedly as she began dragging Merry down the hall. "We are just a few cars down."

_We?_ Merry wondered. _Who are we?_ But then it hit her. Lily has brothers – two of them to be precise. She had never met them though. Actually, Merry had never been to the Potter's house. She had always wondered about that, but it all seemed so obvious now. Of course, if the Potters were an all-magical family, there would have to be signs of magic everywhere and, as her parents had told her when her Hogwarts letter arrived, they had tried to keep the world of magic from her in case she wasn't magical. She didn't like that they had kept all of this from her, and she was quite angry with her parents for quite a few days, but in the end she understood their reasoning. If she had known that Lily could do magic, and that she herself couldn't, she would have been terribly jealous.

However, when Lily slid open the door of a compartment and showed her in, there was only one boy there, and he didn't look at all like any of the pictures of her brothers that Lily had showed her.

Merry hovered in the doorway until Lily gave her a determined push, making her stumble ungracefully forward. She stopped in the middle of the room, waiting for something to happen.

"Hugo, this is Merry; Merry, my cousin Hugo. I've told you about him, remember?"

"Yes, i do remember. Pleased to meet you," said Merry, offering her hand in greeting. Hugo shook it, and the three of them sat down – Lily and Merry on one side of the compartment and Hugo on the other side, facing them.

She felt a little out of place. She remembered that Hugo was Lily's cousin, and that he also came from an all magical family, while Merry herself was the only one whose parents were normal people. _Moggles,_ or something like that.

She was not going to let this keep her from making a good impression however. She guessed that she would probably see quite a bit of Hugo in the coming years, and as she didn't want to look like she was stupid or ignorant, she began talking about the little things she knew about the magical world. She soon understood that she had a lot to learn.

• • •

"So, there are balls trying to knock people off their brooms?" Merry asked.

"Yes!" answered Hugo enthusiastically. "There are two of them, called bludgers, and the beaters are using bats to send them at players on the opposing team." he continued.

"But what if you get hit in some sensitive part, like the head?"

"Well, at Hogwarts they don't use professional balls. The Hogwarts bludgers are a little softer and slower than a professional bludger. They still hurt like hell though," Hugo said, grinning madly. "A professional bludger on the other hand is like a cannonball. They can easily shatter your bones on impact."

"Yeah," interjected Lily. "Mum said that the first bludger she took as a harpy broke half the bones in her left arm. But she still managed to use her remaining arm to score a last goal before they could switch her for a reserve chaser so she could see a healer," Lily told them, her face glowing with pride at her mothers' achievement.

Merry wondered how they could talk about so horrific injuries so easily, but decided it really didn't matter very much.

"So your mum has played Quidditch professionally?" Merry asked Lily.

• • •

They talked about Quidditch and their respective families until a young lady appeared outside their compartment, asking if they wanted anything from the trolley. Merry, who had started to feel a bit hungry at this point, quickly made her way out into the hall. The others claimed that their parents had already made lunch, so they waited in the compartment.

Once she saw what was offered however, she became confused - a feeling she had become quite accustomed to ever since she arrived at platform 9¾ that morning.

There was a wide assortment of sweets, none of which she had ever heard of.

There were a box filled with bags of multi-coloured, fingernail-sized candies called _Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans,_ stacks of boxes containing something called _Chocolate Frogs_ and a display of thin black sticks advertised as _Liquorice Wands;_ among lots of other weird looking packages with equally weird sounding product names printed on them.

She ended up buying a bag of Every Flavour Beans, a couple of boxes of Chocolate Frogs, and a bottle of Pumpkin Juice.

when she returned her compartment, she found Hugo and Lily, once again, engaged in a deep discussion on Quidditch.

Merry reached for a box of Chocolate Frogs and proceeded to open it. She gave a shriek of surprise when the sweet suddenly jumped out of the box, narrowly missing her head.

"WHAT THE HELL?" she yelled, swatting wildly around her face, half hoping to catch the runaway candy and half trying to keep it trying to attack her again.

Her heart was pumping wildly from the sudden rush of adrenalin in her system, but through the blood rushing in her ears, she could hear her friends laughing at her.

"Shut up!" she called to her friends, but they showed no sign of stopping.

"Why did that chocolate just attack me?" she insisted.

"So-sorry," Hugo managed to croak between his laughs, which fortunately for him, was now fading.

"But the look on your face was priceless," he continued. Merry ignored him.

"Well?"

She looked at Lily instead. They had both stopped laughing now. At least Lily had the dignity to look ashamed.

"We probably should have told you," she said, "but we're kinda used to it by now. The chocolate frogs have a tendency to jump when you open the box, so it's usually a good idea to put your hand over the box once you've opened it. Here, let me show you."

Lily held out her hand and Merry handed her a box of Chocolate Frogs. As she did, she could see Hugo out of the corner of her eye, picking up a piece of chocolate from the floor. It was covered with whatever had been on the floor. _Sorry,_ he mouthed at her. She decided to accept the apology, though he didn't have to know that.

She focused back on Lily, who proceeded to instruct her on how to most efficiently open a box of Chocolate Frogs. "Just watch what I do, and repeat," she said.

After a few tries - and a few wasted frogs - Merry managed to master the technique of, while holding her hand flat, flicking the lid open followed by quickly sliding her hand over the box, effectively trapping the frog inside. Lily had explained that the charms on the frogs were only strong enough to give it one good jump. After that, it would just hit the side of the box.

• • •

During the next hours, Lily and Hugo taught Merry how to play a card game called _Exploding Snap,_ in which the cards had a disturbing affinity to explode at random. They also had competitions in who could build the highest card house before it exploded in a shower of cardboard and smoke. Hugo, who had the steadiest hands, managed to get a full three stories before his building filled the compartment with a confetti of card fragments, which promptly began piecing themselves together again.

Merry's house however, even though she tried to handle the cards delicately, kept blowing up in her face every time she got too close.

"Bugger this," she sighed in resignation when her third house blew. "I need to go to the loo. Which way is closest?" she asked.

"Don't know," Lily replied. "But I guess it won't be very far either way."

"Okay, thanks," Merry said as she rose from her seat and moved out into the hall. She looked left and right, but couldn't see anything that would indicate the location of a toilet anywhere. She turned right and started making her way up the train.

Everywhere she looked, there were people running around, chasing each other down corridors, playing pranks on each other and, in some cases, shooting spells at each other. In one compartment, she even glimpsed a blonde boy and a redheaded girl snogging.

Finally, she spotted a sign with the letters 'WC' and an arrow pointing towards a door at the end of the carriage. She made her way over, but the lock indicated that the loo was currently being in use. She leaned against the wall beside the door, waiting for the occupant to finish.

That's when she heard a voice coming from behind the door. The voice was muffled, so she couldn't hear what it was saying, but it was clearly male. Then another, higher pitched voice answered the first. This one was distinctly female. Intrigued, Merry put an ear to the door, trying to hear what was said.

"_You are sure the first plan is ready for execution?"_ the male voice asked.

"_Of course I am, I oversaw the preparations myself,"_ the female replied.

"_Just making sure; we can't be careful enough with all the Potters and Weasleys running around,"_ the male said. _"Okay, you leave now,"_ he continued, _"and I'll come after you in five minutes."_

Merry heard footsteps approaching the door and leapt away into the corridor, doing her best to look like she was just happening to be walking by as the lock clicked open and the female walked out. Merry didn't dare look behind her to see who it was, but she felt relief flooding her body when the footsteps turned and walked the opposite was from her own. Forgetting her previous need for a visit to the loo, she made her way back to the compartment she shared with her friends.

• • •

When she arrived, she merely nodded at her friends as they welcomed her back. She then sat down and closed her eyes, thinking about what she had overheard.

Someone was planning something at Hogwarts, and they were worried that the Weasleys or the Potters was going to make it difficult for them. She would have to ask Lily and Hugo about that. She had a feeling there was something huge nobody had told her yet.


End file.
